Marc Andreessen's Greatest Twitter Hits

Jill Krasny is a staff writer for Inc. magazine, where she covers the intersection of entertainment and startups. Prior to joining Inc., she wrote for MTV and Esquire and was an editor at TheStreet. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California with a major in Communication.

If you scroll back--way back--on Marc Andreessen's Twitter feed, the first message you'll find is "Twittering!" dated May 10, 2007. It would be another four years before the Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist returned to tweet, "I'm back--did anything happen while I was gone?" beforepromptly taking another two-year hiatus. Since resurfacing on January 1, Andreessen has been prolific, dispensing wisdom on all manner of topics--including many of keen interest to business owners, such as entrepreneurs' legal battles, media startups, and crowdfunding. Here are a few of his choice sentiments.

On Legal Problems:

A "whole series of top-end CEOs, entrepreneurs, bankers, and others" have ended up facing criminal charges, Andreessen tweeted on February 6. This despite viewing themselves as good people, at least in the beginning. The takeaway, wrote Andreessen, is this: "Good people with good intent in top business roles must be very careful and frankly a little paranoid about white collar law."

On Media Disrupters:

Andreessen obviously has love for the three news startups he's invested in, PandoDaily, Talking Points Memo, and Business Insider. But he also sees great things happening at The New York Times, "which has evidently cracked code on print->digital after hard effort" and the gadget review site The Wirecutter, which he calls "a mini gadget news empire" and "a new style of tech journalism." Dubbing The Verge "a daily must-read" for its "full coverage of tech industry news," Andreessen predicts the site will grow 10 times larger in the next five years. He also expects Vice, the "media empire" known for its scathing Dos and Don'ts list, to expand its readership as well, thanks to its intrepid reporting and video.

On Crowdfunding:

"Crowdfunded campaigns may specify exclusive access to funders as option," the VC tweeted, "but assume for news/journalism donors will want open access by all." Beyond that, he thinks crowdfunding could be such a large part of the economy in 20 years that "doing things the old way may look crude, quaint."

On Venture Capital Funding:

"Most great businesses in the world are not funded by VC, nor should they be," Andreessen tweeted on February 5. "VC is very specific model for one case."

On Being a Little Fish:

On February 5, Andreessen declared his belief in the little guy. "Most great businesses are not big businesses," he tweeted. "This market [is] plenty big enough for thousands of high-margin [and] small-medium businesses."